Oberon Alternatives

Oberon reviews and mentions

• Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jun 2026

  I have many GPL projects (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon, https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon, https://github.com/rochus-keller/Micron) and spend a significant amount of time in them. GPL has always explicitly permitted commercial use; that's a feature, not a bug, dating back to Stallman's original vision. Any person or company can use my code (or Kefir code) under the terms of the GPL, as I use code given away by companies under GPL or even more liberal licences for free. That's the deal. GPL is a license explicitly designed to maximize use, so it doesn't make sense to object to a specific form of use. The claim that AI companies are somehow violating GPL by training on GPL code is legally baseless (I studied law here in Switzerland and had lectures about international IP law); also the FSF itself has not claimed otherwise in any binding legal position; even if it were prohibited, it would be a copyright enforcement problem, and not a reason to stop publishing. I don't know Kefir, but it looks like a great (even optimizing) compiler. So it's really a pitty that its development is no longer open source.

• The Green Side of the Lua
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2026

  V8 was significantly faster than LuaJIT when I did measurements in 2021 (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcase...). Sure there are microbenchmarks where LuaJIT performs equally well or even faster, but overall (geomean of factors) V8 was 2.5 times faster. This comes with a price though. If you're interested in performance, Mono was equally fast as V8 in my measurements but much leaner, and more flexible with a well-documented bytecode, or use a LuaJIT or Mono backend for the development environment and offer a C transpiler for maximum performance at runtime.

• Oberon et al., vs. Rust
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Dec 2025
• Benchmark suite in Oberon, C++, C, Pascal, Micron and Luon
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Oct 2025
• Titania Programming Language
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Sep 2025

  Remarkable that Bill is interested in a version of Oberon-07. It's even more minimalistic than the previous Oberon versions. I spent a lot of time with the original Oberon language versions and experimented with extensions to make the language more useful for system programming (e.g. https://oberon-lang.github.io/ and https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon/). Eventually I had to give up backward compatibility to get to a language which I really consider suitable for system programming (and still minimal in the spirit of Oberon, see https://github.com/micron-language/specification/ and https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron/); it's still evolving though.

  If I get it right, Bill's language is considered for teaching purpose, which is also a goal of Wirth's languages. Also note that the name "Oberon" was not inspired by Shakespeare, but by the Voyager space probe's flyby and photography of Uranus's moons during the mid-1980s when the language was being developed (see https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf page 12).

• OBNC – Oberon-07 Compiler
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 May 2025

  Ok, I see, thanks; so it's the same version as implemented in OBNC posted above. It's the last version Wirth specified, and quite different from the versions used for the Oberon systems 2, 3 and 4 in the nineties. Personally I consider Oberon-2 the most useful version, but I still had to get rid of a lot of orthodoxies to really use it in my projects (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon).

• The Teal Programming Language
  17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 May 2025

  > LuaJITted Lua code runs at 80% (on average, sometimes faster!) of the compiled C version of the same algorithm, typically

  Cannot confirm this. It might be true on selected micro benchmarks. Here are the results of the Are-we-fast-yet benchmark suite, which includes a decent set of benchmarks challenging CPU, cache and memory access: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon/blob/master/testcase....

  On average, the C and C++ implementations are five times faster than LuaJIT.

• Oberon Pi
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 May 2025

  > Oberon also doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore as far as I can tell

  See https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon, and derived languages such as https://github.com/rochus-keller/Luon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/Micron, which inherit the "spirit of Oberon", but specialize for other use-cases than the original.

• Vishap Oberon Compiler
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Apr 2025

  > Since Oberon is as much a compiler as it's a complete system,

  The system and the language are two different things (even if they unfortunately share the same name); the language itself doesn't depend on the system. Instead there is a standard library defined in the Oakwood guidelines; the guidelines even define a (primitive) drawing window (XYPlane). The Oberon+ compiler (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon/) includes a foreign function interface and a binding to e.g. the NAppGUI library which is a powerfull cross-platform user interface framework, but also an SDL binding, which is e.g. used by https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3/.

• Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?
  38 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Mar 2025

  My major system programming languages are C and C++, but I did some projects in Oberon (which turned out to be not particularly suited for systems programming), and then created a modified, better suited version of it called Oberon+ (https://github.com/rochus-keller/Oberon), which I e.g. used to create platform-independend versions of different Oberon System generations.

  But Oberon+ is still too high-level for many system programming tasks. So I'm designing a new system programming language called Micron (for Micro Oberon, see https://github.com/micron-language/specification) which has the full power of C without its disadvantages. You can even use it for the OS bootstrapping when there is no stack and no heap, but also for higher-level application development, due to its selectable language levels.

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